


I Say Our City is Small and Teeming with Ghosts

by magistrate



Series: (and you live with a ghost) [2]
Category: White Collar
Genre: (discussion of) Suicide, (discussion of) Suicide Attempts, Angst, Backstory, Character Study, Choices, Gen, H/C Bingo 2013, H/C bingo, Missing Scenes, Probably Not Procedurally Accurate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-01
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-12-22 02:59:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/908098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magistrate/pseuds/magistrate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Witness Protection Program has never had a fatality among any of the witnesses who follow the rules.  It's going outside the rules – contacting people from your old life, trying to settle unfinished business – that gets you in trouble, but Ellen's been hiding for 30 years, and it's not as though she's got much left to lose. (Spoilers through 4x04 "Parting Shots" of White Collar.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Say Our City is Small and Teeming with Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> _You say sometimes you wake and wait_   
>  _for the god of loneliness to leave you alone._   
>  _I say our city is small and teeming_   
>  _with ghosts and there are no seasons_   
>  _for hiding._
> 
> – "Match", Brynn Saito

It was Sunday and Ellen wasn't expecting anyone when there was a knock on her door, but the fact that it was a knock and not a ring from the entrance thirty floors below narrowed the list of suspects. And it wasn't much of a surprise when she peered through the peephole to see one Denise Alvarez, US Marshal, in the hallway.

Ellen sighed, and opened the door. She had a feeling she knew what this was about.

"Denise," she said – with warmth, because she had actually come to care for this woman. "Nice of you to visit. Lemonade?"

"You're a peach, Ellen," Denise deadpanned. "Sure. We've gotta talk."

"Come on in, then."

Denise lingered while Ellen pulled the pitcher from the fridge and poured lemonade into two tall glasses, and Ellen herded her to the couch by the big picture windows and set the glasses down. "You're here about my contact with the FBI," she said.

"I don't give two rats' asses that they were with the FBI," Denise said. "One of them's in your file. James Bennet and Andrea Caffrey's son?"

"I'm not apologizing for that," Ellen said. "He was in the program once, with me. I practically raised that boy."

"Yeah," Denise said. "And now he's a big neon link back to all the people who chased you into the program in the first place."

"And what's the big deal?" Ellen asked, too sharply. "I've given all the testimony I'm able to give – years and years ago. All your program has left to do with me is shepherd me peacefully into my old age, until I die in my bed some day."

"The big deal is, I don't like people dying on my watch," Denise said. "When people follow the rules, the program works. In four decades, no one who's followed the rules has ever been hurt. It's when people people get stupid, when they start sticking out their necks–"

"Denise." Ellen made her voice hard, the way she'd learned to shut up the boys in her department who might run over her words without thinking twice. It still worked, even on this spitfire marshal who thought that by this point she was the only law in the room. "I will tolerate a lot, but don't you call me stupid."

Denise bit off what she'd been saying, clean as a pruning snip. "I apologize," she said. "You're not stupid, Ellen. It's just what you're doing is."

"And you take a special offense to that?"

"I take offense to it."

Ellen examined her: her rigid back, the lines drawn in tension across her forehead, her mouth. "No," she said. "This? It's personal for you."

Denise narrowed her eyes at Ellen, then snorted and looked down into her lemonade. "Goddamn retired cops," she said. "You can take the dog out of the fight. You want to do this? You want to hear my sob story?"

"I've got nothing else to do," Ellen said, and Denise dug her knuckles into the surface of the table.

"Fine."

* * *

"I was nineteen," Denise said. "Back home from my first semester of college." She'd been studying political science and criminal justice, thinking about law, maybe, and looking forward to seeing her brother, all of sixteen and with a chip on both shoulders.

Clever kid. Mind set up in blacks and whites and gunpowder, though; volatile and private, and Ellen had to suppress a shudder, there. Got into drugs, nothing hard – marijuana and alcohol and stuff that at his age got him with the wrong crowd right away.

Denise said, "He never was one to ask for help."

Here was the situation: yeah, he smoked and drank, but he knew when they were pushing him toward the harder stuff, and he just wasn't interested. When they pushed hard, he pushed back, and his pushing involved a call to the police when the pressure didn't let up. Just a little punch back, you-bug-me-and-I-sting-you, and, well, seemed like everyone but him could see where that was going.

"Parents wanted to move him off to live with cousins in the Appalachians," Denise said. "When I went back to visit, I just thought it had been dead things in his locker, fights after school, that stuff. My mom didn't want me to know about the pictures, or the other stuff." _Other stuff_ seemed to be as far as she would go, on that. "So I didn't know how bad it had got. Not until I walked into his room one day and found him lying in his vomit. He'd got that 190-proof stuff, and just – I mean, there was no way he didn't know what would kill him. No one drinks a liter of that to get drunk. No one drinks that stuff for the taste."

There was a noise, she said, to discovering something like that. Your blood got loud and started screaming in your ears, and you were just drowning in the sound, drowning in the blood, and that hid the noise of the world cracking in two. But it didn't stop you from learning how there were plenty of ways of murder: murder by harassment, murder by suicide. Didn't keep you from understanding that sometimes your enemies got to you by _getting_ to you, getting you to help out on their dirty work.

Sometimes, the enemy _became_ you.

* * *

"They got him for narcing," Ellen said. It was an old story. One of the oldest. "Is that why you became a Marshal?"

Denise turned her face to her with the look of an eagle, a hunter who didn't see a purpose in being anything else. "Well, something sure as hell changed. It got a lot harder to watch people make boneheaded mistakes."

"Just because you don't agree with me doesn't make it a mistake."

Denise pursed her lips, drumming her knuckles against the table. After a moment she looked down, but just momentarily.

"Look," she said, "I should absolutely not be telling you this, but what the hell, let's all break the rules today. Another one of the New York marshals came to me recently. Said that someone came to _him_ insinuating they'd buy witness information." She held Ellen's gaze steady. "It could have been yours he was looking for."

"I thought the FBI already took care of your bad egg," Ellen said.

Denise huffed. "Yeah, that's probably why our mystery caller went fishing. And he'll probably keep fishing until he gets a bite. Marshals are human, Ellen, and this guy was man enough to say he was tempted. Whoever's doing this has resources and info at his disposal. Info on us. What our pain points are."

"I'm sorry," Ellen said. If nothing else, she knew how it felt to see the integrity of your department tested.

Denise watched her, as though that'd be the turning point. "We get you out of the city. We get you out of the state. That's how we keep you safe."

Out of the city. On the run again, or that's how it felt, and Neal was stuck here, facing up to his past after a decade and a half while she was still running from it.

_No._

"Give me some time," Ellen said. "A week or two. Not too long."

Denise hit the table with her palm. " _Dammit_ , Ellen! I'm trying to keep you safe, here, and it's like all you want to do is try to die. You know what you're doing to me?"

Ellen let her voice grow cool. "I have an idea."

* * *

Ellen had spent a long time hiding the truth. Not for James Bennet, who'd got himself in deep with the wrong people; no, she'd let the world make a liar of her because there were things, that, in a fair world, children should never have to learn about their parents.

Capacity to kill was one of those things. Murder of self, murder of others.

For fifteen years, Ellen had been complicit in covering up both; she'd let her best friend lie to her son, tell him over and over the story of his assumedly-dead father's heroism, and she'd kept Danny's pistol at her house under lock and key, and never made space for his mother to accompany them to the range. She taught him about trigger discipline and gun maintenance and how there was always, almost always, a better option. Guns were for the times all the other options failed.

Sometimes, not even for them.

She remembered a day in St. Louis – bright sun, cool breeze, one of those temperate Spring days that were supposed to be hopeful and alive with the promise of new growth.

The woman she'd gone into Witness Protection with had taken the name _Miriam_ , in honor of some aunt or great-aunt who'd been cut from her life forever. Ellen was going to surprise her with cut flowers from the pots she grew at home – even then she'd known Miriam needed a tug or two to bring her back into the sunlight.

She hadn't been expecting to walk into the house to find her at the little table tucked into the corner of the kitchen, with a notepad out, and a tall bottle of scotch, and a knife. It was hardly two o'clock and too much of the bottle was drained, and the paper had a line that said _Danny_ , and nothing more.

Ellen remembered feeling cold, but not surprised. Cold and heavy and stuck in time, like if it wasn't accident that got her right there, right then, then it was probably enemy action. It already felt like she'd arrived too late when she took Miriam's hand and led her out onto the front steps, where they'd sat stared out at the neighborhood, and after a while Miriam let her head slip onto Ellen's shoulder.

"You're a better mother than I am," Miriam said.

Ellen had grimaced, and she'd wanted to say something back to that. But she wasn't a great believer in reassuring little lies, so all she had left was "You can't let yourself think like that."

"It's all I can think," Miriam said, voice like a knife set. "You're a better mother to him than I am. You were a better partner to James than I was a wife. And that's all I have left, Ellen. Everything I had, of my own – it's all back in DC and I let that _bastard_ take it all from me."

Struggling for something to say, Ellen stumbled upon: "You know what they said. We can make a new life, here. Any sort of life we want."

"I don't want a new life here," Miriam said. "I want the life I was building. I want my family and my house and my name back. And I'm never going to get any of it."

Ellen found her hand, and held it, and wished she could go back and put every person in the old DC department behind bars, if that was what it took. Clean the place out like a flash flood. But she didn't have that option so she told Miriam about her work at the bank, and how she'd stunned a couple of the old hands when she dropped an aggressive customer on his ass and put his ass out the door without flinching a bit, and how they could take a day off one day while Danny was in school and see a matinee, maybe; she tried to remind Miriam that the world was still out there for them, that life was still an option. It wasn't ultimately enough, but it was enough for this one day, so she kept talking.

The US Marshals would provide or refer you to psychological care, but it didn't do much good if you refused it.

There was a reason Ellen went by Miriam's house every weekend, spending hours on gardens eked out of their front lawn, and it wasn't all because she didn't have a lawn of her own. And there was a reason she ended up on their front steps or their livingroom couch for most of those fifteen years, sitting close enough for Miriam to lean into her if she needed to, glasses of wine held like lifeblood in their hands.

That came to an abrupt end, though not in the way she'd always thought it would.

Fifteen years in and she couldn't lie any longer, because the world was about to make the lies obvious. She'd told Danny the truth to keep him from learning it from some sergeant at the police academy, of from his own damn cat's curiosity. Danny was a smart kid, and if he started looking up DC, he'd find it out sooner or later: there was no DC cop, the year they went into hiding, who went down in a hail of bullets. Just the one who went down for murder, lost his family into the system, and disappeared.

Danny was a smart kid, but he had a temper like a flash grenade, and when she told him, he ran. The marshals said a few days later that they's got a letter from him indicating he was leaving Witness Protection; now he was someone on the outside who knew their real identities, knew who they were and how to find them, and regulations said they had to be moved again.

Ellen did her best. Kept her first name, not that she thought it would help. Asked to be placed near Miriam, again. But it hadn't all been James, where Danny had gotten his temper; they told her, on the way to Omaha, that Miriam had requested to be placed far away from her.

And that was the last she'd heard.

A decade and a half, and she didn't know whether or not Miriam survived another part of her life slipping away from her. Whether or not she survived herself. And all the while the marshals listened carefully to her concerns and promised to make counseling available, wherever her old friend might be.

But they wouldn't give her any details. After a while, they'd no longer confirm or deny that she'd existed at all.

* * *

"I'm walking into this with my eyes open, Denise. These people have already destroyed the lives of almost everyone I hold dear," Ellen said. "If there's a chance I can bring them down, you bet I'm going to."

"My god," Denise said, and the condensation on the lemonade beaded and ran down over her fingers. "What is it, Ellen? Write a letter. Hand in a written statement, but don't do this. Have you just decided you've lived long enough?"

Ellen, looking at this woman who was thirty years younger than her and had the same straight-backed, hard-eyed bulldog determination she'd once been proud of, set her jaw and her shoulders and stood her ground. "I used to be a policewoman," she said. "It isn't right that I can't see this through."

"The world isn't right," Denise said.

Ellen nodded. "It's our job to try and make it be."

Denise scrubbed a hand across her face, and turned to the big picture windows, the view that opened up over the East River.

"We're going to move you," she said. "Put you on the other side of the country from DC. Unless you want to walk out of Witness Protection right now."

Ellen was silent.

"As long as you're in the program, as long as you're in New York, I'm going to do my damnedest to keep you safe," Denise said, turning back.

"You do that," Ellen said. "And I appreciate it. I do. But I'm going to help my boy." She clasped her hands, holding them tight against any faltering. "Maybe we'll both get what we want."

Denise didn't look like she believed that.

"Just help me now," Ellen said. "My boy's lost his family twice over, already. Denise, just _help_ me before we take it all away again."

Denise sighed, ran a hand back through her hair. "We'll move you out of here. Put you in a new apartment for a _week_ , with undercover marshals on your door. And then we're getting you out of here, Ellen, and god help me, if this all goes wrong–"

"It won't be your fault," Ellen said, quickly. "You can only do so much, Denise."

"Don't I know that." Denise started for the door, said "I'll be in touch," and then paused, just as she was about to pass by.

She met Ellen's eyes, and Ellen met hers, with all the strength and resolve in her body.

Denise offered a hand, and Ellen took it. "You stubborn, crazy old lady," Denise said, squeezing down on her hand. "You better be too stubborn for them to get to."

"I will be," Ellen promised, and let Denise walk out the door.

Who knew? Maybe she would be. Maybe Neal and his FBI friends would put a nail in this, and she'd be around to see it. And if she wasn't, well, what was one more promise broken, between friends?

It hardly meant anything. An ache in the heart. A few new regrets.

She set the door chain after Denise went, and pressed her hands into the wood of the door. She didn't want to die. She knew she might – hell, given who was after her, given what they had already done and what they stood to lose, she might as well be honest with herself and admit that the odds were against her. She might be writing her death with her own hands, but she loved life, still, and didn't want to see it go.

Ellen walked to the balcony and let herself out, looking down at the water. Always flowing past, with its boats and its trams, and never seeming to go anywhere, from where they'd put her here. Same scene every day. A day from now, a week from now, and she'd be either dead or gone.

 _Hell_ , she told herself. She was tired of living by the river, anyway.


End file.
